


be your own hero

by loveology



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Stiles POV, aka the pack but shhhh, general badassery, it's simultaneously a coffee shop au, stiles is the bae, superhero au, there is a league of heroes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 04:11:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3276227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveology/pseuds/loveology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When your best friend gets super powers it tends to affect your life a whole lot more than you anticipated. But it's also really awesome.</p>
            </blockquote>





	be your own hero

**Author's Note:**

> Just a few changes to canon I'd like to note ahead of time (other than, you know, the obvious) : It's starting senior year of high school in this fic. And with that, Stiles is already aware that he's gay, and is over his obsession with Lydia, about which you'll hear more in the coming chapters.
> 
> Thanks so much for taking the time to read, I really appreciate it! This is my first fanfic, so I apologize sincerely if it sucks.

When Scott develops a superpower, Stiles isn’t jealous. In fact, he’s ecstatic. He is beside himself with excitement. Scott having superspeed a la the Flash is like a dream. Except, In Stiles dream he was more like Spiderman, and okay, maybe it was _him_ who was the superhero, not Scott. So maybe he is a little jealous, after all. But that’s always been his dream, and all Scott’s ever wanted to do was survive life and maybe get a girlfriend, so Stiles sucks it up and does his best to help him. He was the reason they were in the abandoned laboratory in the first place, after all.

\----  
The day Scott and Stiles sneak into an old abandoned science laboratory (Stiles’s idea) and check out the old machine (also Stiles’s idea) and Scott gets trapped inside of it and Stiles brushes against a button and thus Scott develops superspeed (not Stiles’s idea, but he’ll take it) and the day that Scott starts using his powers to help people are two different days entirely. 

They’re sitting on Stiles’s bed doing math homework when Stiles hears his father’s radio go off. He doesn’t think any of it until he hears the words ‘can’t catch him’ and realizes that he knows someone who can. Someone who happens to be sitting on the same bed as him and hears the same conversation. 

“I know what you’re thinking, Stiles,” Scott begins before Stiles can. Anticipating Stiles’s interruption, Scott continues on. “But I’m not a hero. I’m only 17, I want to ask Allison Argent to prom, I want to pass math and graduate, I want to be off the bench in Lacrosse, I’m not cut out to be a hero.” 

“You could be, though,” he blurts. “You could be the best superhero ever. You can catch this guy, this could be your origin story.” He speaks like a twelve year old who’s read too many comics and has dreams bigger than the world. “With great power comes great responsibility.”

“I never wanted this,” Scott snaps. But that’s when Stiles knows he’s won, because he can hear the resignation in his friend’s voice. Because Scott Mccall is nothing if not the best person that Stiles has ever met, and if he can do anything to help people he’ll take it. 

“We need to come up with your secret identity,” he says with a grin. Scott frowns.

“No we don’t, because I’m not doing this more than once.” Stiles just rolls his eyes because he has a gut feeling that this will be much more of a regular occurrence than Scott thinks, and the last time he had a gut feeling he fucking aced that test, so. But he lets it be. 

They listen through the door as his father gets updated on the location as he leaves to head to the chase. Scott looks clueless but luckily Stiles knows exactly where he’s talking about and quickly tells Scott where to head them off. Scott’s out the door in a blur and Stiles suddenly knows what people in The Flash comics saw as they watched him leave. 

Scott returned triumphant but butt naked after putting the thief straight in the back of the moving police car and accidentally burning his clothes in the process. Stiles hands him some gym shorts and a t-shirt as soon as he stopped laughing. 

They turn on the TV just as the breaking news report comes on. They see the confused criminal and the equally confused cops and neither Scott nor Stiles can hide the grins that appear on their faces. It hasn’t yet disappeared when Stiles’s father walks through the door rubbing the back of his head in confusion. But there’s something else there, too. That feeling of having a secret that lifts you up, of knowing something that no one else does that you want to just share with the world, but that you also want to keep to yourself. 

Stiles would be lying if he said he didn’t sit up straighter in class and wear a smirk that says ‘I know something you don’t’ the next week at school every time he heard students whispering about the news. 

\---

The first time Scott actually needs Stiles is two weeks and three ‘missions’ (for lack of a better word) later. Scott’s ‘just this once’ became ‘only twice’ became ‘three’s the charm’ and this time he foregoes that altogether and simply starts with ‘so, I need your help.’ It’s not like Stiles hasn’t been helping. He’s good with lying to teachers and the parental units, celebrating victories, and he’s fantastic moral support, thank you very much. But that’s not where his real talents lie. It’s not just that he enjoys research, he’s good at it too. He lives for learning new facts, not all of which are entirely relevant (example being: the time he wrote an essay on the history of male circumcision. Never mind that it was for the wrong class.) But whatever. The point is, facts he can do.

Scott flashes into Stiles room and says “So, I need your help,” and while it could be with homework or girl trouble (though Stiles is gay and a virgin of the never-been-kissed variety so the amount of help he could give in that departments is limited), the look on Scott’s face says it’s not. 

“I thought it was just a regular bad guy, but it wasn’t.” Scott says, and suddenly the exhaustion is real, the bruises visible. “He had superpowers, too.” Stiles takes a second to take it in, to wrap his head around it. 

“What’s his power?” he asks after about two seconds of silence. 

“Fire…”

“So, like, can fire appear on his hands, or how does that work?” Stiles asked curiously. “And does it look as cool as it sounds?”

Scott gives him a look before answering. “The usual, fire can come out of his hands, I don’t know how much power he has, or what else he can do. But he beat me.” 

“You’re not dead yet,” Stiles says, determined to keep it that way. Even as he searched a few things he felt like he was missing some gaping piece of information. He clicks the back button to go back to the google search when a word on one of the web pages sticks out. _Oxygen_. Fire needs oxygen. He gets an idea and a slow smirk appears on his face.

“That’s creepy, dude,” Scott says, but apparently creepy is contagious because he starts smiling as well, even though he appears to have no idea why. 

“Fire and oxygen, dude.” Stiles says triumphantly. He gets a little exasperated when Scott doesn’t fully appreciate his genius so he elaborates. “Just run around him really fast in a tight circle and you’ll cut off his oxygen supply. No oxygen, no fire.” 

Scott defeats the villain easily, he doesn’t want to kill him though, so Stiles suggests he just runs him to the Sheriff’s station, and he had stolen stuff on him when Scott caught him, so that’s that. 

“You’re the real hero here, you know.” Scott says. 

Stiles smiles but shakes his head because he doesn’t believe it, not really. Not yet. 

\-----

There’s a few weeks there where nothing interesting happens. At least in the superhero department. In other news though, he got a part-time job at a hipster coffee shop and there’s a model-from-another-planet-because-he’s-out-of-this-world-hot regular who almost always looks grumpy but Stiles sometimes catches him staring at him, so maybe there’s hope for mere mortals, after all. 

It’s two weeks and one day after the incident with the supervillain and Scott and Stiles haven’t spotted anyone else with powers yet. But while Stiles might have passed Scott’s powers as a freak accident if they hadn’t run into anyone else with him, the fact of the matter is people with powers exist. There were all sorts of stories, he realizes, that in the past he dismissed as the kind of bullshit that stems from wishful thinking. But now that he knows that they can be true, he’s been wondering what all is true.

There are rumors about a league of heroes who save the day from villains, but very few people know about them. There are blogs and websites dedicated to them, though there are only a few. He’s looking at one of these websites doing some research at a table in the coffee shop during his 30 minute break. 

That’s when hot regular comes in. 

It’s a Saturday afternoon so unsurprisingly there is no table open. After hot regular gets his coffee, Stiles’s manager gives him this look that probably means to get up for the paying customer, but Stiles is also a paying customer at the moment. Instead he decides to take a risk and gestures for the seat across from him with an attempt at a daring eyebrow raise, but he’s not that smooth and he never quite mastered that so he’s pretty sure he just looks constipated. At least if he’s judging by the slightly amused but also slightly judging look on hot regulars face. 

“Stiles,” he tells the guy, holding out his hand to shake across the table after the other guy finally sits down.

“Derek,” hot regular says, but he doesn’t shake Stiles’s hand. Rude. 

Stiles settles into some small talk with him, even if the answers are of the single word variety. They settle into an awkward silence that Stiles and his attention issues are not comfortable with, however, so he finds himself saying the first thing he can think of to say. 

“So, do you come here often?” Stiles knows the answer. 

“Are you hitting on me?” Hot regular- Derek- asks suspiciously. 

_Maybe_ , he thinks. “I don’t think anyone in this room would blame me if I did,” he says instead. And by the way so many people in the room are listening in on their every word, he knows this is true. 

Time isn’t on his side though, because his supervisor looks at him and taps his watch meaningfully. “It was nice to meet you, Derek,” he says casually, feeling the (insanely attractive) man’s stare as he walks away.

A little awkward but overall a good start, he thinks as he puts his apron back on.

This is a good day.

\---

The next day? Not so much.

Not only had he put off his homework, but hey, he and Scott get kidnapped. Priorities, right?

He’s standing on the sidelines yelling advice to Scott when someone grabs him. He struggles to get out, but he’s not exactly a top tier athlete and while he puts up a good fight, it’s ultimately useless. 

Scott speeds over a second later but while he normally would dodge anyone who stands in his way, this time he can’t. The man is strong. He has to be not to get knocked over, he has to be to hold onto scott and not let him go. And that’s how Stiles knows that he’s superhuman as well. 

They get blindfolded and gagged and while Stiles tries his best to keep track (left, right, left, left, up a few stairs) he loses track pretty quickly. He didn’t have a very complete mental map of this part of town anyway, so it’s not like the directions would help him overly much.

“We’ve been watching you,” came a man’s voice after they were placed (gently, to the kidnappers’ credit) down. The blindfolds are taken off and Stiles found himself in a large room open room that looks like an unfinished basement (or maybe a dungeon, but he tries not to think that.) 

“That’s not creepy at all,” he says sarcastically and turns to look at his captors. There are four of them, the guys and one girl, and they’re all wearing suits that look specially designed, along with masks that cover their eyes. Stiles had always been skeptical about the masks that just cover the eyes, because how did people not recognize the hero? Only, now he sort of understands. It may not cover their entire faces, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for exactly, your features are obscured entirely.

  

They ignore him. Instead they turn their attention to Scott. “We’ve been watching you fight,” says the one that Stiles is starting to suspect is their leader due to the way they’re all standing with him at the center. “And while you could use some training,” he adds. Which, okay, _point_. “We think you could be an asset to our team.” 

“Of villains?” Scott asks, outraged. 

Even through the mask Stiles could see the girl’s eye roll, that’s how big it was. “Oh, please,” she says, “if we were villains do you really think you’d be alive right now?” 

“And even if we were that hell-bent on getting you on our team of ‘villains’,” Said one of the others with air quotes. “Do you think _he’d_ be alive right now?” He being Stiles. Stiles who shudders at the words. Stiles who doesn’t particularly want to die at the age of 17 and a virgin. That Stiles. 

“Maybe you know that I would never join you if you hurt him.” 

“Yeah, we’re kind of a package deal,” Stiles says quickly. 

Leader guy doesn’t even respond to the conversation that has broken out, instead he just says, calmly: “They call us the league of heroes in some places.”

Stiles feels relief as the conversation plummets back into more familiar territory. Fearing for his life? He’s not used to that. Stuff he researches? Well, that he can do. The problem with this subject, however, is that the rumors and the facts are jumbled together so much that they’re impossible to distinguish. 

“What are your powers?” he asks curiously. And so they show him.

It’s one thing to hear about super strength, to see it in comic book form-- he thinks briefly as he watches leader guy fling an weight that’s at least… really heavy clear across the room without so much as breaking a sweat--and an entirely different thing to see someone use it. The other three powers may be less flashy, but they’re equally awesome.

Healing yourself and others, shape shifting, and enhanced senses. Add on super speed and they could rival the justice league on the best team of superheroes list. If they worked really hard, they might could even beat out the Avengers. 

“Just think about it,” leader guy says. He sounds like he doesn’t care, but Stiles suspects that he does. He wouldn’t have gone through all of this trouble if he didn’t. “You have a week to decide.” 

He starts walking towards the door, but pauses when Scott interrupts lamely. “Wait, how will I find you?” 

“You won’t, we’ll find you.” 

“Oh, and as a little incentive,” the girl adds. “You’ll get a suit if you join us, so you won’t have to worry about your little… burning clothes problem.” Which has kind of gotten out of hand. Scott’s made a point of bringing at least two changes of clothes with him wherever he goes, and Stiles always keeps one handy as well. So, yeah, a fireproof suit would be awesome. 

“Just think about it.You could help make the world a better place, you could save so many lives.”

With that, the four of them leave the room and Scott Mccall and Stiles Stilinski are both literally and figuratively left in the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Next up: We meet Lydia and Jackson, Stiles gets to know Derek a bit better, Scott comes to a decision, and Stiles's researching skills are put to good use. Not necessarily in that order.


End file.
